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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

YALE BOOK: GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS NEED URGENT ACTION

NEW HAVEN, CONN, May 3, 2004 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The international community must take urgent action to address global-scale threats to the environment or face an era of unprecedented environmental decline, argues "Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment," a new book by Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Dean James Gustave Speth.

"Time is running out," said Speth, who is also a former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the Carter Administration. "We are on the verge of reaping an appalling deterioration of our natural assets. Only unprecedented action taken with a profound sense of urgency can forestall these consequences."

Surveying 10 major areas of concern, Speth said some progress has been made on reversing ozone depletion, stabilizing world population and curbing acid rain, but weak international environmental treaties and lack of U.S. leadership have failed to slow climate disruption, desertification, deforestation, extinction of species, freshwater shortages, fisheries depletion and the buildup of highly dangerous chemicals, despite 25 years of public attention.

Published this month by Yale University Press, the book outlines steps in eight areas that, taken together, would provide the needed transition to environmental sustainability. "These transitions require genuine partnership between countries of the North and South, as well as actions far outside the traditional areas of environmental policy," Speth said. "Collectively, they will do three things of immense importance. They will directly attack the underlying drivers of deterioration. They will greatly enhance the prospects for success of treaties and other agreements by altering the context in which the agreements are operating. And they will facilitate a very different, more hopeful and powerful way of doing the business of global environmental governance."

After reviewing the trends in global environmental deterioration-biotic impoverishment, climate disruption and toxification, "Red Sky at Morning" analyzes why the initiatives taken over the past two decades have not worked thus far and will not work in the future. "Lured on by the success of domestic environmental law and some early international efforts, we freighted international environmental law with virtually the whole burden of dealing with increasingly complex global issues," Speth said.

He added, "And then we left the treaty-making to outmoded procedures and weak institutions. The result has been toothless treaties."

"Red Sky at Morning" points out that tropical forests continue to disappear at an acre a second, water shortages are mounting, species losses are occurring at 100 to 1,000 times the expected rate, ocean fisheries are declining rapidly, and emissions of the principal climate-altering gas continue to grow, increasing 22 percent between 1980 and 2000.

Speth says there are hopeful signs and encouraging developments, among them: improved scientific understanding, slowed population growth rates, reductions in world poverty, development of technologies in energy and elsewhere that can bring major environmental improvement, increased use of market forces to achieve environmentally honest prices, greater knowledge of what's required for effective treaties, and remarkable new capacities in civil society.

Most impressive, Speth notes, is the surge in "green jazz," the bottom-up, improvisational, unscripted initiatives being taken by business, nongovernmental Organizations, cities and states, and religious and other associations.

"It has been said that people act out of love or fear - to realize a positive vision or to avoid disaster," Speth says. "This volume focuses on the looming disaster and how to avoid it. And the positive vision? You do not need me to provide it. You have seen it at Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Smokies; when fishing for trout or spotting a bird or hiking the woodlands; in the salt marsh, the blackwater swamp, the grassland prairie, the urban park. You have seen it in the crisp air and clear water, the children playing in the stream, the sunset at the beach, the monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico, the birds newly arrived at the feeder, even the deer eating your sedum. It is part of you and me, and we are part of it. And it will be there for our children and their children and so on, forever, if we have the wisdom to protect it."

The book includes a chapter on "Resources for Citizens," which contains an inventory of web-based and other resources for individuals and groups interested in promoting the transition to sustainability as voters, consumers, investors, workers, association members and activists.

CONTACT: Dave DeFusco, 203-436-4842 david.defusco@yale.edu

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